Faculty

Willie Hiatt

Description

Willie Hiatt joined the C.W. Post faculty in Fall 2010. After earning a doctorate in Latin American history in 2009, he spent one year as a visiting professor at Rhodes College, a liberal arts school in Memphis, Tenn. He is committed to interdisciplinary teaching and research. His dissertation, “The Rarefied Air of the Modern: Aviation and Peruvian Participation in World History, 1910-1950,” explores how a self-perceived “backward” Andean country interpreted, engaged, and contested Western modernity through aviation. He draws upon science and technology studies, modernity studies and postcolonial scholarship to theorize the “universal” technology of aviation as a script for world history. Before pursuing a doctorate, the Kentucky native was a sports writer, copy editor and designer for newspapers in Kentucky and Florida.

Specialties

19th- and 20th-century Peruvian Social and Cultural History; Latin American Indigenous Studies, Political Violence and Print Culture; Science and Technology Studies; Postcolonial Studies; World History

Publications

Author, “Flying ‘Cholo:’ Incas, Airplanes, and the Construction of Andean Modernity in 1920s Cuzco, Peru,” in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History (2007)

Translator, “In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes” (2010)